Month: May 2020

Currently, we are awash in Big Data, it’s everywhere, totally pervasive and quite frankly a little overbearing as corporations and governments collect ALL of our person measurements and vital statistics. Worse, we have folks who don’t know what to do with it all, but know somehow in the future all that data they’ve collected will be worth something? Will it – in what form? In its current format or some other future format which is non-importable? Many grocery store chains collect data on our purchases and have for a decade or more, and all that old data is pretty irrelevant to our purchases today, and most of that old data is in an unusable format. Find out more about Fusionex Big Data.

Of course, that is the least of the worries with Big Data today. The most pressing issue I find is that we have stupid humans misinterpreting the data, continually coming up with false positives. For instance, I have received targeted ads suggesting sports support bras, what a waste of money, as I am a man. Even when the targeted ad goes after physically active and fit individuals, in this case 50%+ of those ads miss their mark. The company may think it is doing well and the Big Data analytic cyber ad company thinks its delivering sales for its client, but it’s 50% inefficient. How can Big Data with so much promise make such Big Mistakes? Indeed, this is a relatively small mistake (in my last example) in the overall scheme of things.

Large Data Mining companies give data to corporate leaders who ‘assume’ that the data means one thing, and then poor decisions with it. These bad decisions lead to lower profits, and rather than fix the mistakes, they re-look at the data with perception bias and then double down on their previous mistakes. In government the same thing is done, often due to errors in causality determination, and then worse when we throw in a little data manipulation to serve their political agenda – always pointing to the data to persuade us that they are doing what’s in the public’s best interest.

If humans cannot do any better than this, maybe they ought to stop collecting the data in the first place because Big Data is about to get even bigger with the Internet of Things and the connected supply chain all the way to the robotic factory floor. If you thought you, as a consumer, were only a number before well now you are many numbers all rolled into one and the data decision makers have already determined everything about you based on algorithms written by information bias inputs – remember even though we are taking about bigger data we still have the problem of GIGO – Garbage In – Garbage Out.